Erica's desperate plasma blast had saved Dante, but the cost was brutal.
Neil, their archivist, lay dead in the dirt. Blood pooled beneath him.
Juno knelt nearby, clutching his broken arm. His face twisted in agony from the curse that linked his pain to Eric's wounds.
They were wounded, grieving, and close to total defeat.
The brief silence after Erica's attack felt heavy. Like death itself was waiting.
Derek's laughter shattered the quiet. Rough and cruel.
"Is that all you've got? One last desperate shot?" He stood up, his smirk returning. "Your strategist is dead. Your healer is busy. Your fighters are bleeding out. It's over."
He was right.
Dante's mind felt trapped. The curse from the Maleficium user was a constant pressure, turning every thought into thick sludge.
His strategies had failed. His team was being dismantled piece by piece.
They couldn't win this fight. Not like this.
'I'm going to watch them all die. Because I can't think fast enough.'
It was in that moment of despair that movement caught his eye.
Juno, still kneeling in pain, was staring intently at the Maleficium user. His eyes had that distant, unfocused look.
Soul Etching was active.
He was reading the curse's structure. The energy threads connecting him to the curse user.
Then Juno's eyes went wide. Understanding. Horror. And then... resolve.
He looked at Dante. Their gazes locked.
Through the bond of fighting together, Dante saw what Juno had discovered.
The Hex of Shared Pain didn't work both ways normally. The caster was protected. But Juno's Soul Etching revealed the curse's flaw.
The connection had a feedback loop. If the cursed target died while the hex was active, the curse would backlash. All that death energy would surge back through the link to its source.
The caster would experience the victim's death as if it were their own.
Juno had found the way to break their formation. But it required his life.
"Juno, no," Dante whispered.
Juno gave him a weak, sad smile. His final message.
'Use this. Win.'
Before anyone could react, he grabbed a jagged stone from the ground with his good hand.
No hesitation. No delay.
With a final, anguished shout that was part grief for Neil and part defiance, he drove the sharp rock deep into his own throat.
Shunk.
Blood sprayed.
"JUNO!" Masha screamed.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic.
The Maleficium user, who had been preparing another curse, suddenly shrieked. Not in triumph, but in real, visceral agony.
The curse connection lit up like a burning wire. Juno's death, his terror, his pain, all of it slammed through the feedback loop straight into the caster's mind.
He collapsed to his knees, clutching his own throat. Choking on phantom blood.
His eyes went wide with the overwhelming sensation of dying. Not dead himself, but his mind shattered by experiencing Juno's death firsthand.
Completely incapacitated.
The fog in Dante's mind vanished like it had never existed.
Grief could wait. Now was the time for vengeance.
"MASHA!" His voice cracked like a whip. "THE ILLUSIONIST! HE'S EXPOSED! ICE COFFIN!"
The Phantasm user, shocked by his teammate's sudden collapse, was half a second too slow.
Masha's face was a mask of cold fury. She channeled her grief and rage into one focused point of absolute zero.
CRACKLE!
The ground beneath the illusionist erupted. A thick coffin of ice encased him instantly, freezing him solid in a silent, eternal scream.
Two down.
"PUPPET!" Dante commanded, shifting focus. "PHASE THROUGH THE BARRIER!"
His shadow creature, still clawing at the Wardcraft user's shield, obeyed.
The barrier flickered as its caster stared in horror at his frozen teammate.
In that brief moment of distraction, the puppet shifted to formless shadow. It passed through the magical wall like smoke.
It solidified on the other side.
Shnk!
Its shadowy hand plunged deep into the Wardcraft user's chest, ending his life before he could turn around.
Three down.
The tide hadn't just turned. It had become a massacre.
"Talia!" Dante called out. "The gravity user is yours!"
Talia, freed from the illusion chaos, moved like lightning.
The injured Graviton mage saw his support crumbling. He tried to run.
He had no chance.
Talia closed the distance in seconds, her rapier a blur. One precise thrust to the base of his skull, and he dropped.
Four down.
In under thirty seconds, their entire backline was eliminated.
What remained was Derek and his four brawlers, still locked in brutal combat with Eric.
Derek roared in fury, watching his coordinated team collapse. "You'll all die for this!"
He activated the full power of his artifact. Crimson light erupted around him as he charged.
Not at Dante this time. At the nearest target.
Talia.
But the team wasn't scattered and vulnerable anymore.
"Eric, intercept!" Dante ordered.
Eric, bloody but unbroken, met Derek's charge head-on. His shield absorbed the brunt of the artifact's power.
BOOM!
The impact sent shockwaves through the ground, but he held firm.
Talia was already there, her rapier darting in, forcing Derek to defend. Her speed against his raw strength.
They pinned him. A two-person wall of defense and precision.
"Edgar, keep calling!"
"His right side opens after a downward swing! The artifact makes him reckless!" Edgar shouted, his voice steady now that the immediate threat to him was gone.
Masha and Erica, her mana slowly recovering, handled crowd control.
Masha coated the ground beneath the four remaining brawlers in slick ice. Their footing became treacherous.
Erica, conserving power, sent small fire bolts that stung without draining her. They forced the brawlers to scatter, breaking their formation.
And then, Dante revealed the true horror.
He extended his hand. Not to one corpse, but to three.
The dead Phantasmist. The Wardcrafter. The Graviton user.
"Rise," he commanded, channeling his power into their cooling bodies.
The air grew cold. The ground darkened beneath them.
Three new shadow puppets rose from the earth. Their forms were twisted silhouettes of the boys they once were.
Their violet eyes opened in unison. A chorus of the damned.
Dante felt the weight of their souls settling into his own. Heavy. Cold. Wrong.
But useful.
He pointed at the four brawlers, who were slipping on Masha's ice, desperately trying to support their leader.
"Overwhelm them."
His three puppets advanced. A silent, terrifying wave of darkness.
They hit the brawlers, who screamed in terror as they were swarmed by the shadowy faces of their dead friends.
The psychological impact was as devastating as the physical.
One brawler dropped his weapon and ran. A puppet chased him down, tackling him to the ground.
Another tried to fight back, swinging his mace wildly. The shadow of his former teammate caught the weapon mid-swing, yanked it away, and drove a shadowy fist through his chest.
The battle was over. Brutal, bloody, and costly.
Dante looked at Juno's still body. The jagged stone still embedded in his throat. Blood staining the earth around him.
His final, desperate gambit had saved them all.
He had found the way to victory when Dante's cursed mind couldn't.
Grief was a cold, heavy weight in Dante's stomach.
But as he watched Derek being worn down by Eric and Talia, and his last men torn apart by the ghosts of their friends, he knew one truth.
'Juno. Neil. I won't waste your deaths.'
A lie, maybe. But a comforting one.
'You were always disposable. But at least you were useful until the end.'
The thought came unbidden. Dark and honest.
He pushed it down. Buried it beneath a mask of grief and determination.
The team couldn't know what he really thought.
They needed to believe he cared.
And maybe, in some small, twisted way, he did.